HOW COULD I WORRY IF I WIN
Hey everyone -
I am EXTREMELY EXCITED to announce that the FIRST EVER Buddha’s Buds music release is now OFFICIALLY LIVE on all streaming platforms
“Worried Wind”
Written and Performed by J4V (Javan)
Produced by Big Jerm and Ben Fredette
Recorded by Berler
Mixed by Ervin Ablaev
This is a HISTORIC MOMENT
If you have been following along so far with these blogs and The Making Of “The Musical” series, you would know that this has been an almost 5 year journey to get to this moment of releasing a song
From October 2021 when the Island Boyz cameos took place. To January 2022 when I had the idea for the album. To March 3, 2022 when “Worried Wind” got recorded, the first song we recorded in Los Angeles. And now all the way until June 28, 2026 when “Worried Wind” FINALLY became available on all streaming platforms
I already told the story of us recording “Worried Wind” in my 2nd blog, so for this blog I will be telling the story of us mixing the song and getting it released
And to tell that story, I need to take you back to my original plan for releasing this album…
So when I started working on the album in January 2022, my goal was to release it that October 2022
I was teasing it a bit on Twitter, the idea of me releasing an album, but I wasn’t showing any proof or anything at all that would convince people an actual “album” really existed
I wanted the realization that I have actually created a real album to be a surprise. I have no history of creating music, so I wanted to use that to my advantage. I felt like people would see those tweets and think “this guy is crazy, there is no way”, and then come into the album with little to no expectations, possibly even thinking it could be a “parody” album, and then the music would be able to speak for itself
But when I realized I was not going to be able to have the album finished by that October 2022, I stopped talking about it online pretty much entirely. I wanted everyone who had read those tweets to completely forget about it, and then I would just drop the project as soon as it’s finished, still as a surprise
Also, on October 10th of 2022, I made a catastrophically bad business decision, and a HUGE WRENCH was thrown into the story…
On October 10th 2022, I released a new collection called “The Decisions To Make Collection”, which included 24 different clothing items dropping all at once
This collection sent me into years of debt which I have still never fully recovered from (I will write another blog eventually about how and why this collection absolutely tanked me)
So from October 2022 until the Spring of 2023 there was barely any progress made on the album
That takes us to June of 2023, when I decided I would try to make a push to get the album finished for that October 2023
I pretty much had everything recorded for all 20 songs, I just needed to find a singer for a few parts, and work on some instrumental motifs to bring it all together
Part of my original plan for finishing the album was to fly to Pittsburgh and do all of the mixing/final recordings over the course of a week with Big Jerm at ID Labs
This is the studio in Pittsburgh I had gone to countless times over the years and watched some of my favorite artists record and mix their albums
But unfortunately, a trip to Pittsburgh was no longer in the budget, so I started emailing all my files to Big Jerm for him to mix remotely
And in the meantime, I was looking for a studio here in Los Angeles to record the final parts
Berler, the engineer I had been recording all the sessions with in LA, had just recently moved back to Miami, so I needed to find someone new to record with….
Spoiler alert, in July of 2023, I found someone…
And when I found this new engineer, that is when “The Musical” really started to take form, and a two year long rollercoaster left the track - filled with crazy insane highs, the lowest of lows, and just so so so much music
I once again missed my goal of releasing the album that October 2023, but this was the start of a whole new beginning now
So from here we are going to fast-forward through the bulk of 2023-2025, but I will say that I had multiple more attempts to release the album during those years - like I said I had already missed October 2022 and 2023, and then I tried and failed again for October 2024, and once again for October 2025
I also planned to have it released for October of this year (2026), and that is more than likely not going to happen, unless I suddenly have a very large influx of money to be able to finish mixing everything
But we are going to pause on September 2025 for a moment, because that is when my new engineer who I had been working with the past few years moved out of Los Angeles
This was unfortunate, because it really put an end to the recording of the album, and years of work that we had been doing together
In hindsight though, it was probably a good thing - because if he didn’t move, I would probably still be trying to get money together for more recording sessions til this day. The recording never would have ended
I was even trying to figure out a new studio to record at right after he moved, but by the end of September, I had come to terms with the fact that I just needed to start mixing the album and move on
There are a bunch of quotes that resonated with me around this time about “finishing” things, but one that I remember clearly that stuck with me is “done is better than perfect”
So anyways, on October 13, 2025, my engineer and I had our first mixing session over Zoom to start finishing the project
Our plan going into it: we would spend 4 hours mixing each song, and try to just focus on the big picture aspects of them, and get them to a place where they are ready to be released, without overthinking anything
Also at this time, it was the beginning of hoodie season (October), and I was able to sell a good amount of the extra hoodies I had left. So I had a little bit of money to make this first mixing push
And we made good progress for a few weeks, getting a close-to-finished draft done of probably half the songs that we were mixing together
Also during the first week or so of Zoom mixing sessions, I had the idea for the series I am currently releasing - The Making Of “The Musical”
I started editing together the first episodes of the series, and putting together a whole roll-out plan surrounding them
The new plan I had now was: release the first episode of the series on Monday January 5th 2026, and then release one episode per week all the way until September or October when the album would drop. 35 or so episodes. And also originally as part of that plan, I would be releasing a bonus track every 2-4 weeks (I have a lot of extra songs that didn’t make it onto the album)
The first of those bonus tracks being “Worried Wind”
So at one point during November 2025, we tried mixing “Worried Wind” to be released
Now mind you, the version of “Worried Wind” I had been listening to up until this point was the version from the night we recorded it in March 2022
We never added anything to it, or tried mixing it prior, so there was never a new version of the song since that night
And one thing I have learned throughout this album process is that in music there is something called “demo-itis” where if you listen to a rough or unfinished version of a song too many times, you will become so used to it, that when you finally go to mix the song, things will sound “wrong” or “off” to you even if you are technically improving the song. You just become so attached to the original version that any little change sounds like something is wrong
Throughout this project I have probably gone through several dozen cases of demo-itis, but this was one of the most severe because “Worried Wind” had stayed untouched for almost 4 years, so I had listened to the original version hundreds of times
Also, as you saw in Episode 1, we recorded this song with my original engineer Berler, and now my new engineer was trying to mix it
And I don’t know if this is the case for everyone, but at least from my experience, when you move session project files between two different engineers, the song is inherently going to sound different right away, just due to them not having all the same plug-ins and whatnot
There were also certain issues with this song specifically, apparently due to how the “delay” was set-up during the initial recording session
So when my new engineer tried mixing the song, all of the vocals sounded like they were slightly moved from where they had been
And I, as someone with insane levels of OCD, and also as someone who claims they notice things down to the frame on a 23.976 fps timeline in Adobe Premiere, could not help but focus on that tiny slight bit of movement in his vocals, even if it was only milliseconds
We worked on the mix though, and got everything sounding good, besides for that tiny bit of movement that I still kept noticing after our session
But soon after that, I had to take another break from the album yet again…
On November 3rd 2025, I had released the Pre-Order for a new hoodie, titled the “New Album" Limited Edition Hoodie, and I did not sell nearly enough pre-orders to fulfill the minimum order requirements for each color
So the hoodie that was supposed to help fund the completion of the album ended up putting me into further debt…
I paused all mixing sessions at the end of November because of this
I sold a bunch of paintings in December to pay for that hoodie order and make up the cost for the minimums I didn’t sell
And then I shipped all those paintings out in January
And then towards the end of January, I started looking into a service called “print-on-demand”, which would allow me to sell products without having to order them in bulk
This was something I had been “against” trying previously, but ordering in bulk had become too much of a risk, and was continuously losing me money at this point because I wasn’t reaching the order minimums with my Pre-Sales
I started ordering samples, and got my first couple print-on-demand products launched by the end of February
From there I kept ordering more samples, and was putting together a full collection so that I could build a new page to house them on (which is now live and called The Print Shop)
And then at the end of February, I put in my 30-day-notice to move out of the apartment I was living in and using to store all my extra boxes. I would be moving fully back into my smaller space that I used for painting/shipping
I ran a big flash sale to try to sell everything I had left, and rented a storage unit to move the rest of my stuff into
Then I spent all of March going back and forth to the storage unit, packing things up, cleaning up both spaces, and then eventually moving everything over before the month ended
And at 12:37am on the morning of April 1st, my move was officially complete
Once my move was complete, not only did I have way less of a financial burden on my hand each month, but my efficiency and quality of life drastically improved by only having the one space (I will write another blog eventually about that era and how crazy things became during it)
So now that I was in the one space, my next big thing I had to do was get everything organized with my business. Figuring out taxes, re-doing my website, etc.
My plan now was to get all of that done by mid-April, do a full launch of The Print Shop on 4/20, make a bunch of sales (hopefully), and start mixing the album again on May 1st. That would have given enough time for an October release
And I got pretty much everything done in April that I needed to, but unfortunately I did not make enough sales, so I did not have the money to make a final mixing push yet
Towards the end of May I reached out to my engineer, and asked him what his schedule was looking like - to see if he could get started June 1st if I was able to get the money together somehow. But, he ended up telling me that he was getting close to landing a full-time job, and probably wouldn’t have much time to work on the album as frequently, even if I had the money
I was upset about these circumstances at first. I was happy that he found a job of course, but upset because this meant I had to come to terms with the fact that I would once again be missing my goal of releasing the album in October for the 5th year straight. And lemme tell you, it has become MORE and MORE difficult each year when I have had to come to terms with this. I am NOT getting any younger any time soon !!!!!!
A few days later though, I just decided….
“I am not going to wait any longer” and “I am going to start rolling this stuff out”
A.K.A. “F*** it, we’re doing it live !!!!!”
I thought “The album might not be mixed yet, but I have the first few episodes of The Making Of series pretty much finished, so let me just start rolling everything out and just see what happens”…. “Maybe sales start to pick up as the episodes come out, and I can still get the album finished in a reasonable amount of time if we mix on the weekends”
So at the beginning of June I started rolling out teaser clips and preparing the first episode of the series to be released
And on June 15th I released the first episode titled “Our Story Begins”
And once I had the first episode released, it was off to the races…
The band-aid had officially been ripped off
The secret was no longer
I announced the project and there was no un-doing that at this point, the cat was out of the bag
And once that first episode had been released, it was much easier for me to say, “ok let’s get some of the music out there now”
So after releasing that first episode, I went back and listened to the mix of “Worried Wind” we had worked on in November
And after all that time passing, I couldn’t remember if the vocals were slightly behind or slightly early from the original version. I listened to it a bunch of times, and still couldn’t tell which it was by listening to it, so I decided it must not be that big of an issue then
Plus I sent the song to Javan, and he said it sounded good to him besides for some minimal notes (for the record though, he hadn’t listened to the original version of the song 100’s of times like I had, so he didn’t have the same demo-itis I did)
So I booked a session with my engineer for last Friday June 19th, with the plan of getting the final mix/master and releasing it
We had our session and I thought everything sounded good, but once we got off the Zoom, there were still a few parts that stuck out to me, so I booked another 2 hour session for Sunday the 21st
We got everything in the mix sounding right during the first hour of our session, but during that time I checked to see if the vocals were lined up with the original version, and saw that they were one frame later than the original based on my 23.976 frames-per-second timeline in Adobe Premiere
I wasn’t able to line up the two songs perfectly though, due to the limitations of a 23.976 fps timeline, so I knew they weren’t off by exactly one frame, it was a more ambiguous distance. Plus some lines weren’t late while others were, so it was very hard to tell. I just knew we had to move the vocals up either a little less or a little more than a frame
And at this point, my engineer was telling me that I am an insane person (which he typically does)
He said “no one is going to notice a one frame difference”, and that “I am only noticing it because I’m looking at it”, and that “I could not possibly hear the difference”
He went on to break down the math of how long a frame is on a 23.976 frames-per-second timeline, to which we discovered it is roughly 41 milliseconds. And there are 1,000 milliseconds in a second, so we are talking about a very tiny amount of time that the vocals were off by
But then, I said to myself “one Mississippi”, and thought “it takes a pretty good amount of time to say that, a lot can happen in those milliseconds”
And we had an hour left in our session anyway, so I thought it might be worth trying to move the vocals. At the very least, I would be able to sleep easier knowing we tried it
So we made a copy of the session and opened the new one. He then asked me how far I wanted to move the vocals and I did not have an answer right away
It was really just a guessing game at this point due to all the factors I mentioned above with the two versions not lining up, some lines not sounding late, etc
I had my head down with my face in my hands as I was thinking about this, and then suddenly something came over me where I just blurted out “38 milliseconds” “we move it 38 milliseconds and it’s done”
My engineer set his Pro Tools timeline to increments of 10 milliseconds, moved it over 4 spots, and then set it to increments of 1 millisecond and moved it back over two spots
He then sent me the final mix and I played it on my speakers for the first time…
And everything sounded perfect
I don’t know if I somehow magically managed to get the vocals lined up by guessing we should move them exactly 38 milliseconds forward, or if my brain just tricked me into thinking they were perfect because we had done all that we could and needed to move on
Probably most definitely the ladder
But I was still SO excited listening to this final mix
I got in my car, even though I had woken up early and was exhausted, and just drove without a destination so that I could hear the mix out of my car speakers
I ended up driving through Raising Cane’s, and before I had even ordered my food I had determined that the mix successfully PASSED the car test
We were ready to release
I sent the mix to Javan and he also approved it, and throughout the week I got everything setup for release
I figured out the layout for my painting on the Single Cover artwork, and finally uploaded the song to streaming services on Thursday night or early Friday morning
When you upload a song, it says it could take anywhere from 1-8 days or possibly even 3 weeks to get on streaming services, depending on the circumstances
I thought my song would probably be on the longer side, because I had never released any music before, and the streaming platforms had to create new pages for Buddha’s Buds
But when I woke up on Friday, the song was already available to be used on Instagram…
And then about an hour later - it was up on Spotify !!!!!
I am an Apple Music user though, so all day I was refreshing Apple Music and waiting….
That time never came though on Friday. Or on Saturday
And then finally this evening around 6:30pm, I searched “Worried Wind” on Apple Music for the 10,000th time and BOOM !!!!! WE WERE LIVE !!!!!!
And that leads us to where we are now, here, as I am writing this blog…
The first ever piece of music ever released by Buddha’s Buds is now OFFICIALLY out
It has been an insanely long journey to get here, and we are only just getting started !!!!!
Lyric video dropping this week !!!!!
Thank you all so much for reading all of this and your continued support, I really can’t express how much I appreciate you being here !!!!
***** Editor’s note from me, Ben, the writer and editor: I wrote this blog a few weeks ago on Sunday June 28th the night “Worried Wind” became live on Apple Music, but I have been busy since then and haven’t had time to edit the blog + add pictures until now July 16th, so the blog is being released a few weeks after I actually wrote it
Since then, the Lyric Video for “Worried Wind” has been released, as you can see below
Also I have released TWO MORE episodes of The Making Of “The Musical” series since then too
Episode 3: Ice Cream Cone
and
Episode 4: Bicycle
Please check them out when you get a chance, and thank you all so much again !!!!!
Love you all !!!!!
Sincerely, Ben